


Cyanide In My Styrofoam Cup

by bonerthatiusedtoknow



Series: Unrequited Frerard Drabbles (Or a Bunch of Times Gerard Said 'I Love You' But Didn't Mean It Like That) [2]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Angst, Drabble Collection, Drunkenness, Frank all up in his feelings, M/M, Tiff has more feelings, Unrequited Love, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:15:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26289352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonerthatiusedtoknow/pseuds/bonerthatiusedtoknow
Summary: Gerard gets handsy at a house party. Frank (and obviously this author) have a lot of feelings about that.{{If you're looking for a happy ending I would maybe take a peak at the series this drabble is a part of. }}
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Series: Unrequited Frerard Drabbles (Or a Bunch of Times Gerard Said 'I Love You' But Didn't Mean It Like That) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1910137
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	Cyanide In My Styrofoam Cup

**Warped Tour 2004**

It’s been a miserably hot summer. His clothes are sticking to him, drenched through with sweat and grime, and everytime he uses his shirt to wipe his face, he just ends up making it worse and streaking dirt on his forehead and cheeks. On a scale from one to ten, he’s a thirteen on the disgusting meter. Frank loves being on tour, he does, so much, but he wants a fucking shower, and a change of clothes, and ten minutes of privacy if that’s not too much to ask. They’ve been cramped together for months, living out of each other’s pockets and in each other’s spaces, what feels like just inches separating them at all times. Which is even worse than it sounds considering how they’re all pretty rank at this point without any consistent access to laundromats or showers. It’s not just Frank either, they’re all starting to feel it. There’s a house party some of the guys from The Used are going to, Mikey has been asking him every three minutes for the last hour if he’s going, popping his head out of the bus like a prairie dog. They did an awesome show, the kind that always leaves them buzzing afterwards with all this residual energy. It’ll be a chance to spread their legs, burn off some of the excess, Frank’s up for it no doubt, but all he can think about right now is washing the day—week—off of him so that he can feel like a human being again.

Gerard has a beer in his hand, not completely lit yet, just kind of loose and easy, listing so that he’s leaning against Frank’s left side while they smoke. “Are you going to come?” he asks. Obviously, Mikey enlisted his brother to do his dirty work for him. A decent strategy all things considered. Frank rubs the sweat from his forehead onto his sleeve and grimaces. He smells like something that died and rotted in the desert for a week. 

He sighs, “Think they’ll let me grab a shower?” Gerard grins wide, flashing tiny teeth. Frank never really stood a chance. 

They arrive a little early at Frank’s insistence, so there’s only a couple dozen people sprinkled around the house, friends and friends of friends. They do let him use their shower, the couple whose house they’re crashing. He hasn’t really gotten used to being recognized yet, and even though he knows in an abstract way that it’s likely that they’re at least familiar with his band, it still throws him when they usher him excitedly to the master bathroom, like he’s doing them a favor, before the question has even fully left his mouth. The woman, Katrina as she introduced herself, shoves an armful of fluffy, floral smelling linens into his arms and tells him to help himself to the shampoo and bodywash. Frank doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy to see running water in his entire life, and twenty minutes later he comes out from behind the shower curtain smelling like a literal rose, his skin scrubbed pink and flushed and blissfully clean.

The music is loud and thrumming, vibrating through the closed door, and he can hear squealing laughter and raised voices just outside, the party gathering momentum now. He scrubs a towel over his wet hair and along his limbs until he can pull on the change of clothes he brought with him in his bag. A brand new person stares back at him in the mirror, or at least that's how he feels. He scrubs a hand over his jaw where he's just starting to get prickly and then sticks his tongue out at himself in the mirror. This is the best he’s felt all tour. Frank grins at his reflection and nods. “I’d fuck me.”

Mikey accosts him with a beer as soon as the door swings open. “Done primping now, ya freak?” Frank puts his palm flat over Mikey’s face and shoves him back, rescuing the beer from his grip before he stumbles back and spills it everywhere. “Ass,” Mikey says, but he’s all smiles and relaxed features.

“That was a fucking great show, man,” Frank says reliving the highlights in head and feeling the buzz. Mikey nods, loops his arm around Frank’s neck and tugs him into a crowd of people that are only significant because of Ray’s hair bobbing in the middle of them. He’s talking animatedly, arms waving around in the air, a big, wide smile stretched across his face. 

“There he is!” Ray claps him on the shoulder once they’ve pushed through the huddle. Toro is the man, Frank grins back. 

“What are we talking about?”

A girl on the other side of Ray speaks up, “That time you kicked a mic stand and hit him in the face with it.”

Frank groans and mentally takes back his previous statement. Toro is the devil. “Again? Fuck, when are you going to let that go?”

Ray shrugs. “When you can go a week without injuring one of us, maybe.” Mikey wraps an arm around his shoulder in a way he supposes is meant to be comforting. He lets his head drop against Mikey’s shoulder and sighs.

“Sounds like you’re doomed,” his ex-best friend says mildly. 

Ray looks around suddenly, his hair swaying with him like a majestic, ginger cloud. “Where’s Gerard? I know he has some good ones. Gee! Gerard!” On the other side of the room, a familiar messy head of black hair swivels in their direction as Ray waves his arms around in the air and beckons him over. “Gee! Tell them about the time Frankie broke your arm!” 

“I didn’t break his arm!” Frank protests, just as Gerard steps up to them, draping his (unbroken) arms around two random women in the circle. 

“Better saddle up for this tale of woe, motherfuckers. It’s a bumpy ride.” Frank steals the extra beer cradled in Ray’s left hand, because he owes him now, the fucker, and saddles up for Gerard’s incredibly hyperbolic and inaccurate retelling of how he got a teeny, tiny, little fracture during a slightly enthusiastic jam session and blamed Frank for it. Followed by about fifty thousand more stories of the same. All the while, Gerard’s eyes fucking twinkle with mirth and all the attention and—when they meet Frank’s—something else, a challenge maybe, giving him the odd wink when Frank gets all squinty-eyed and objective. It’s comforting almost, and warm, the comradery between them, just him and his boys giving him shit without a care in the world. It’s been a little tense lately, difficult conversations lingering in the spaces between them—left unspoken but not unnoticed. It’s over too soon though, because McKraken strolls up in the middle of a story, about Mikey this time, loose limbed and high already, curling his arms around Gerard’s middle as he mumbles something into his ear. Frank can’t hear, but he can guess, and then they disappear into the crowd of bodies, and he makes it his mission to sniff out more booze.

A few hours later finds Frank perched over the toilet, face first, emptying the entire contents of his stomach with a gross, echoing retching sound that makes him feel even more sick. He’d been fine until one of the guys in the kitchen that fancied himself a bartender had handed him a drink that contained, what Frank suspects to be, every alcoholic beverage known to man. A handful of those, plus all of the beers he’d put down beforehand, and Frank is really and truly fucked. It’d been nice actually, feeling the easy sprawl of his limbs across the couch cushions while he listened to—Charlie? Chad? Carlos? He can’t remember—talk about the new Grand Theft Auto he’d just bought, nothing on his mind but the thump of the music and the drone of the guy’s voice buzzing pleasantly in his ear. Definitely not about how Gerard had fucked off with Bert three hours ago and he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since, doing only god knew what, forsaking the rest of the group to hang on Bert like a particularly persistent leech. He likes Bert well enough, but there have been times when Gerard has come stumbling out of bathrooms with him, clothes askew, eyes glassy, pupils blown wide in a way they never were just from drinking, and Frank has wanted to rip out his throat. He imagines that finding them together tonight would elicit more of the same brand of violent imagery.

So yeah, it had been nice for a while, lounging on the couch, not thinking about any of that, tossing back drinks like skittles because Gerard had told him, on no uncertain terms, months ago that he wasn’t his keeper. Drunk and not Gerard’s keeper is Frank’s happy place at parties now. Well. Not now, at this precise moment, when he’s throwing his guts up, but just like in general. Eventually, when his stomach stops trying to force itself up his throat, Frank flushes the toilet and rinses the taste out of his mouth with handfuls of water from the faucet. The night is still young, and Frank decides that he is now effectively a blank slate with tons of room for more alcohol, opening the door to set off in search of the kitchen and beer. When he turns the knob though, Gerard—who had apparently been listening with his ear pressed up against the wood—falls bodily into him and knocks him flat on his back, Gerard landing on top of him hard enough to force all the air out of his body with an ‘oof.’ 

“Hey Frankie,” Gerard chirps, grinning down at him like he isn’t crushing the life from his body.

“Motherfucker,” Frank wheezes and tries ineffectually to shove him off. “Off me fucker, what were you even doing?”

Gerard sits up a bit, literally just a scant few inches, just enough to prop his elbow on Frank’s chest so he can rest his chin in his hand. “Listening,” he says simply, unabashed in that way that is uniquely him, honest and unashamed to the point that it comes across almost like naivety. And now that Frank can get a good look at him, he can see that Gerard’s eyes are red, pupils taking up most of the irises and he wants to kill something. 

“Fucking creeper,” he says, and shoves at Gerard’s shoulders again, bucking his hips to try and knock him off, but Gerard is a solid weight against him and apparently doesn’t have plans to move anytime soon. “Gerard come on, I can’t fucking breathe.”

Gerard pouts. “Not like that. Just waiting until you were done, so we could hang out.”

Frank sighs and lets his head drop back to the floor, resolved to his fate. Crushed to death like that guy in  _ The Crucible. _ The pressing of Frank Iero. “Where’s Bert? Thought you guys were siamese twins?”

“He left.” Gerard wiggles on top of him a little, like he’s settling in, trying to get comfortable. “Had somewhere to be.”

“That was fast,” Frank muttered. Just came by long enough to get him high and then fucked the hell off, figures. Through his stupor, it occurs to him that he’s flat on his back on the bathroom floor with Gerard on top of him, fucking wriggling and snuggling into his chest, and that there’s a million people around passing by giving them strange looks. The tile is cold through his thin t-shirt, and Gerard is warm everywhere that they’re pressed together, if a little—a lot—musty. 

“Don’t be jealous, Frankie,” Gerard admonishes and then he presses his face into Frank’s neck, right below his chin, and breathes in deep. “You smell fucking gorgeous. Like a spring breeze or some shit, what the fuck?” 

“It’s called a shower, you should try it sometime.” He isn’t absolutely comfortable with the route this is taking. Even pissed off, Frank is in dangerous territory with Gerard pressing him into the floor, nuzzling his neck, fucking sniffing him, and— “Get off of me, man!” Frank shoves Gerard to the side hard, only feeling a little twinge of remorse when he hits the open door with a crack, mostly just from the door slamming into the wall behind it. He shoves himself up and to his feet, wiping the spit off of his neck where Gerard had fucking  _ licked _ him, and glares down at Gerard who is looking up at him dazzidly which makes him deflate just a bit.

“You smelled nice,” he says sullenly and Frank sighs, holding a hand out for him to grab onto. 

“Yeah, well. Told you I couldn’t breathe, asshole.” Gerard eyes him knowingly, unnerving, but he lets Frank pull him to his feet, though they both sway and lose their footing, tripping into each other and holding on for dear life until their worlds stop spinning. “I’m going to find another beer, you coming?”

“Sounded like you had enough.” Frank snorts at Gerard’s meaningful looks at the toilet and shoves his way through the door. It’s rich coming from Gerard of all people who has been drunk since noon probably, but Frank thinks better of saying so.

“Thanks for the concern, mom.”

“Frankie.” Gerard catches his wrist with a too-warm hand, tugging him in the opposite direction. “Come dance with me,” he says, and his eyes are big and earnest, and Frank is such a drunk fucking sap, even though he still kind of wants to punch him in the face, that all he can do is give in and let Gerard pull him back into the living room. 

There has to be a hundred people stuffed into this three bedroom house, bodies everywhere, barely any space to move. The music is louder here and Gerard is saying something, though Frank can’t really make out the words. He looks around, trying to find Mikey or Ray or maybe Matt, but his vantage point is not excellent and Gerard is not helpful either, or maybe he just can’t hear him when he asks him where the other guys are, so he gives up on that after a while, just allowing himself to move to the music, be in a different, less on-edge headspace. 

“This is my fucking jam!” Gerard yells, his mouth pressed close to Frank’s ear so that it brushes the curve of it, and Frank allows himself to notice for the first time how Gerard’s body is pressed up against his back, how his breath keeps puffing out against the side of his neck while Gerard sways and bounces and dips. Gerard is talking again, a hum that Frank can’t hear for the life of him, so he asks, ‘What?’ half a dozen times but doesn’t get an answer that’s any more audible than the faint buzz of his voice over the music. Then Gerard’s arm slides around Frank’s waist, his hand flat over Frank’s belly with his fingers spread wide, and his hips are moving, gyrating, but it’s not that kind of music. It’s not a ‘molest Frank in a crowd of sweaty, drunk bodies’ type of song, and they’re not fucking around on stage, and Gerard isn’t singing or anything, just pressing his face into the side of Frank’s head, right behind his ear. 

Gerard has two fingers slid under the hem of Frank’s shirt to press into his skin, the other is tucked into his front pocket, and Frank already can’t catch his breath when Gerard’s mouth starts brushing against the hollow behind his ear. The half of him that is stupidly hopeful, that catalogues their every touch and shared look, their every inside joke and all of Gerard’s private smiles he saves just for him, that savors their stage personas and fantasizes a continuation in a bathroom stall somewhere afterwards, is burning up with it. That half of him is singing and begging his hands to move just a little lower, to dip under the waistband of his jeans, to grind hard and dirty against his ass and let Frank feel the hot line of his dick through layers of denim. The other half of him, the realistic half that knows Gerard doesn’t want him that way, is fucking terrified because Gerard knows—has to know— how Frank feels, it’s so fucking obvious. Frank has never been any good at keeping his feelings tucked away where no one can see, and if Gerard knows, knows and doesn’t want him back, why is he screwing with Frank like this? Like some sick fucking joke. Like an experiment. 

He’s twisted up between his two halves, stuck here with Gerard grinding into him, not able to force himself to do anything one way or the either, until Gerard sucks his earlobe into his mouth. It sends a shock through his whole body, like a lightning strike, and at first he thinks it’s the hopeless romantic that wins over, thinks when he grabs Gerard’s hand on his stomach it’ll be to shove it into his jeans, that he’ll thrust back into him, enjoy this gift for what it is and worry about repercussions later. But when he wraps his hand around Gerard’s wrist, it’s to pull him off, and when he spins around to face him, it’s not to press their lips together. Gerard watches him with confusion, a little divot forming between his eyebrows, and Frank can totally relate. He grabs him by the elbow and drags him all the way outside, shoving people aside with single minded determination and not a scrap of remorse. There are people out here too, but it’s quieter so Frank doesn’t have to scream to be heard. 

“What the fuck, Gee?” he demands, and he shoves him back against the side of the house a little harder than he means to. “What the fuck was that?”

He looks even more baffled than before, if that’s even possible, and also a little like he’s going to fall over. Frank puts a hand out to steady him. “I thought that— I mean, that’s what you want, right?” It’s one thing, to suspect that Gerard knows, it’s a whole other thing to hear it out in the open, stark, black night like that. Frank’s heart contracts painfully in his chest. 

“ _ What? _ ” His voice is this shaky gasp that doesn’t even sound like him, and he’s embarrassed but he can’t think about that now, because Gerard’s words keep echoing in his head.  _ That’s what you want, right? That’s what  _ you _ want, right? That’s what  _ you want.

Gerard looks small, slouching against the brick, confused and stunned, and now, a little guilty. “I thought that you wanted—” he makes a vague motion with his hands in Frank’s direction. “From me, and you were mad. About Bert. I thought—I didn’t want you to be mad anymore.” It feels like someone threw sand in his eyes, grainy and stinging, and Frank looks away quickly, blinking back tears that threaten to prickle at his eyes, and Gerard looks so fucking concerned and afraid and Frank wants to wrap him in a hug or wring his neck, he doesn’t even know.

“Not like that,” he chokes out finally, “I don’t want you like—not if you don’t want me. Don’t ever do that to me.” And his voice fucking cracks as he says it, but he forces it out anyway, “I can’t fucking take it, okay? Just. Don’t—” He stops because he’s about to embarrass himself by crying in this random strangers yard in front of Gerard, because he tried to grope him at a house party, and he’s so fucking pathetic, seriously. But Gerard maybe looks like he wants to cry too, or maybe it’s the drugs making his eyes look all wet and glassy. 

“I won’t. I won’t do it again,” he promises. Frank doesn’t have it in him to back up when Gerard leans in to wrap him up in a tight hug, Gerard’s hugs have always been his favorite thing. “I’m sorry, Frankie.” And he’s pressing kisses into the top of Frank’s head like he’s an infant but he doesn’t even mind. “I love you.”

Frank nods into Gerard’s chest. “I know.”   



End file.
